The collapse of the badger culling trial in Gloucestershire represents a humiliation for the government’s policy on reducing bovine TB. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

The controversial badger cull in Gloucestershire is being abandoned after marksmen failed to kill enough animals to meet even drastically reduced targets, the Guardian revealed on Friday.

The collapse of the culling trial represents a humiliation for the government's policy as it means every target set has now been missed.

Natural England (NE) will revoke the culling licence and the cull will end at noon on Saturday, three weeks earlier than planned. The cull, intended to help curb tuberculosis in cattle, was initially tasked with killing 70% of all badgers in the area in a maximum of six weeks.

A revised target of 58% was set but shooters have failed to kill enough badgers on any night and several night saw no kills at all. The extended cull was due to end on 18 December.

The environment secretary, Owen Paterson, said previously he wanted to roll out the culls across the country, but will have to wait for the verdict of an independent panel of experts. The panel – which will judge whether the culls have been effective, safe and humane – said it would only consider the initial six-week periods of shooting in Gloucestershire and the other pilot cull in Somerset. Both areas failed to meet the target of killing 70% of badgers in the six weeks.

Farming minister George Eustice said: "The extension to the cull has been worthwhile and has removed a significant number of badgers which will make a difference to disease control in the area. Let's not forget that more than 305,000 cattle have been slaughtered in Great Britain in the past decade due to this terrible disease, which is why we are doing everything we can to get it under control."

Anti-cull campaigners called the cull a "fiasco" and a "shambles". Mark Jones, Gloucestershire vet and executive director of Humane Society International-UK said: "I am much relieved the government's badger cull fiasco is finally over, for the time being at least. We hope the government will now do the decent thing and admit that killing badgers to control TB in cattle is a ludicrous and inhumane idea."

Brian May, musician and founder of Save Me, said: "Now that the failure of this whole shameful badger cull shambles can be seen so clearly seen, in spite of many moves of the goalposts, it must be time to abandon the concept, and get on with the only strategy which can ultimately succeed in eradication of bovine TB - vaccination."

The pilot culls were testing whether shooting free-running badgers at night could kill sufficient numbers of the animal to reduce TB in cattle herds. An earlier, decade-long trial found that culling could after four years curb TB infections by about 16%, but it used the more expensive method of trapping the badgers in cages before shooting them. Those culls were also carried out quickly – within eight to 11 days – and experts have warned repeatedly that the much longer and less effective current pilots risk actually increasing TB, as fleeing badgers spread the disease more widely, an effect called perturbation. The scientists behind the decade-long trial have called the cull "mindless" and a "costly distraction".

Peter Kendall, president of the National Farmers Union, which represents the culling companies, said he supported the decision to end cull. He added: "It is thanks to the professionalism and organisation of the farmers, landowners and contractors on the ground that the operations have been carried out safely and humanely despite intense provocation and intimidation by some anti-cull protesters. The NFU remains committed to supporting wider roll out to help prevent the spread of this terrible disease."

Dominic Dyer, at Care for the Wild, said a protest against the cull in Bristol on Saturday would now turn into a celebration. "We've already learned lessons about culling – that it doesn't work. And we know that there is another way – an improved cattle management system, in conjunction with volunteer-led badger vaccination," he said.

The RSPCA's David Bowles, said: "The pilot culls have failed in every aspect. Badgers have been needlessly killed and this could well have made the problems of bovine TB in cattle worse not better in these areas because of the perturbation effect."

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More than 1 in 20 badgers took more than five minutes to die after being shot by government contracted marksmen. After the badger cull also failed to meet its target number of kills, can the policy proceed? With your help, Karl Mathiesen investigates